Why would it have to wait for an Open market? How are sutis like that dependant on an open market in any way? Sure.... people who don't want to participate in FW would be dependant on a market if they wanted to circumvent the loyalty thing, but its not a necessity. AS for the "suit selection" i think this would be a good place to put those "regulated" matches people wanted in. You can even push it into the games lore by saying the "empires wanted you to wear their colors" or some other nonsense. If you want to fight people using your specialized gear, go do it in pub matches or corp matches. Having regulated gear in at-least one place would allow for those whom are less fortunate to play on "even" terms. Besides...... why would a caldari suit be fighting on the side of the gallente? That just doesn't make any sense...... (yeah yeah, clones whatever, im just sayin)

Standings are actually something we are looking at. We have a design rolling around for improvements to FW that involves them.

I am personally not a fan of loyalty points for a couple reasons; that doesn't mean they won't ever happen just a lot of discussion will have to happen first. They are another currency to keep track of, actually it would be 4 more currencies. It means we need equipment/weapons/dropsuits/whatever for all the races but they also need to be different so as to give reason to pick different faction but also balanced. There are lots of other reasons. That all being said there are also reasons for it, so down the road once we have a well set scheme for adding new items and player trading I can see us adding loyalty points.

Being given a certain selection of fittings will not happen. Our game is built on the idea of players consuming items. That and when you put all this time and effort into building custom fits, skilling into specific fits, and all that sort of stuff going into a more advanced game mode and being told you are limited to specific fits that you didn't create... that isn't so fun.

Good stuff though and thanks for sharing! :D